Interview

Ann McCoy is a New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic, and Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail.

She was awarded a 2019 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She lectured on art history, the history of projection, and mythology in the graduate design section of the Yale School of Drama until May 2020, and taught in the Art History Department at Barnard College from 1980 through 2000.

She has written about artists working with projection including William Kentridge, Tony Oursler, Nalini Malini, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.  Ann McCoy and Kentridge did a conversation at the American Academy in Rome for his Tiber project, “Triumphs and Laments”, which was published in the Brooklyn Rail.

Ann McCoy’ work is included in the following collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Roy L. Neuberger Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Ann McCoy has received the following awards: the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Award in the Visual Arts, the Prix de Rome, the National Endowment for the Art, the Berliner Kunstler Program D.A.A.D., and the New Talent Award of Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Ann McCoy has exhibited in the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Annual, and has had one-person exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Poland, and Berlin. She is known primarily known for her large format drawings, work with projection, installation, and bronze sculpture.

Ann McCoy worked with Prof. C.A. Meier, Jung’s heir apparent for twenty-five years in Zurich. She has a background in Jungian psychology and philosophy. She has studied alchemy since the early seventies in Zurich, and Rome at the Vatican Library.  Most of her work is based on her dreams, and their relationship to alchemical texts, and Christian alchemy in particular.  For McCoy, alchemy is a symbolic language of processes dealing with spiritual transformation.  Incarnation of spirit into matter is the key concept of the alchemical practice.  The imagination is the gateway to the gods.

Robin Pogrebin is a reporter on the Culture Desk of The New York Times, where she covers cultural institutions, the art world, architecture and other topics.

She is also the author, with Kate Kelly of the book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” published in September 2019. At the Times, she has also covered the media industry for the Business Desk and city news for the Metro Desk. Prior to joining the Times in 1995, she was an associate producer for Peter Jennings’ documentary unit at ABC News and, before that, a staff reporter at The New York Observer.

Her freelance work has been featured in magazines like Vogue, Town & Country and Departures, along with several book anthologies. Pogrebin, who also teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts, is a frequent moderator, radio guest and speaker. She lives in New York City.

Jessamyn Lovell (b. 1977, Syracuse, NY) is a conceptual artist working with photography, video, performance, and surveillance contemplating class and personal identity. Lovell holds a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA from California College of the Arts.

She is based in Albuquerque, NM where she is currently a Senior Lecturer and Undergraduate Director of the Art Department at the University of New Mexico. Lovell is a founding member and activist leader in the United Academics of the University of New Mexico, the institution’s new faculty union and a licensed and practicing private investigator.

Lovell has received international recognition for her artwork including Dear Erin Hart, for which she found, followed and photographed her identity thief. She received her private investigator’s license in 2017 for D.I.Y. P.I. (Do It Yourself Private Investigation), a long-term conceptual art piece. 

Matthew Langley received his BFA from Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC in 1985. Since then, Langley’s work has been shown extensively in the United States and Europe through numerous group and solo exhibitions.

Recent exhibitions include; Big Circle at M17 Contemporary Art Center, Kiev, In Color at Page Bond Gallery, Richmond, VA and The Unified Field at Blank Space, New York, NY.

Langley’s artworks have also been included in various public and corporate collections including; the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage, and Construction, The Doris Patz Collection at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, Ernest and Young, PNC Bank, Saks Fifth Avenue, Norwegian Cruise Lines, MacAndrews & Forbes and the State Department of the United States.

He currently lives and works in New York.

Books mentioned in the interview were White by Kenya Hara. Hara has been the art director of Muji since 2001. Also mentioned were the books of John le Carré